


with such unrest what peace can come?

by decadencethief



Category: Lake of Voices (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, albeit very low-key and subdued
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21726292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decadencethief/pseuds/decadencethief
Summary: Kikka keeps writing to the guide.After the first letter, it’s sporadic, dependent on her assignments and her fancy. She sends the second letter almost two months later, and then the third barely a fortnight after that. She talks about her work, about the people she meets, about her travels—always taking the longer way around Sinnlos, never venturing too close to that cursed lake. It’s what she promised, after all.She never expects a response.
Relationships: Kikka/The Guide
Comments: 5
Kudos: 47





	with such unrest what peace can come?

Kikka keeps writing to the guide.

After the first letter, it’s sporadic, dependent on her assignments and her fancy. She sends the second letter almost two months later, and then the third barely a fortnight after that. She talks about her work, about the people she meets, about her travels—always taking the longer way around Sinnlos, never venturing too close to that cursed lake. It’s what she promised, after all. 

She never expects a response. 

She makes a point to tell him when she has successfully dissuaded someone from crossing Sinnlos. She hopes that brings him some measure of… if not relief, then at least assurance that he’s not entirely alone in his mission.

At first, she keeps her missives brief. There is no point in pretending he’s not a fixture in her mind, but she makes sure to talk to him like she would to a casual acquaintance. She reckons that’s what they are, after all. She only knew the man for two days.

Gradually, though, she finds herself penning longer and longer letters, until her candle melts away almost entirely and her eyelids grow heavy. She never knows if he reads her letters at all, and maybe that’s why she lets herself open up quite like this. And even if he did, he made it explicitly clear they were never to meet again: she’s preemptively spared the embarrassment of having to meet her unwitting confidant’s eyes.

So, Kikka talks to him.

About her alienation from the rest of the guards after she returned from her trip across Sinnlos, about the funeral arrangements for the people that didn’t. Closed casket services, of course. She tells the guide about her own guilt at surviving when others didn’t. She wants to ask him if he feels the same sometimes, but she decides against it. 

Eventually, she tells him about the nightmares, too.

Bridges that stretch out as far as the eye can see, rotten through and ever narrower. She can walk freely at first, in the middle of them, but with every step, they grow smaller under her feet, until there’s barely room for her to fit each of her feet. Her whole body burns; her lungs are tight and each inhale sends a pang of sharp pain through them, as if she is being stabbed in the chest. There’s nothing in sight but an endless murky lake with dark figures marring its surface like fresh bruises. The Nixi never come to attack her, but oh, they are there, cackling and clicking and gurgling in their dissonant chorus.

She wakes up, trembling and clammy with cold sweat.

Some nights, when it’s especially bad and she cannot find her way back into sleep, she lights a fresh candle and starts composing a new letter. The handwriting is messier in these ones, but she sends them regardless. She isn’t sure why.

Six months pass, then eight. Kikka does not stop sending her letters. 

Then, the accident happens and she’s not able to write for a while.

It’s not too bad, all things considered. She and her current partner, the one that isn’t Bemelle, get ambushed by a band of highwaypeople on their way between two villages. There are too many of them to fend off, but something about their leering faces and the chaotic approach tear something in her loose. 

She and her partner make it. Three of the thieves don’t.

She knows to appreciate her luck when the sword that slices through her arm doesn’t damage any major arteries. Still, her writing hand is going to be out of commission for a while.

She’s confined to a bed for a week afterwards, but she hardly gets any sleep.

Halfway through the third week, she receives a letter.

It’s not in an envelope, nor bears any sigil or seal. It’s a plain sheet of paper neatly folded in three. 

There is only one person it can be from, but that’s impossible, so for a while, Kikka simply stares at it, trying to divine its contents.

At length, she opens it. Thankfully, she’s regained enough command of her injured arm to require no assistance.

_ Kikka: I heard about your injury. Be certain to rest, and recover quickly. _

It’s unsigned. The hand is sharp and unsteady, like the sender hasn’t written a lot of letters, and in several spots, the line is thick, almost bleeding through, and Kikka can see a deep indent in the paper.

She doesn’t know how long she stares at the letter, or what she expects to glean from the two sentences. She has no doubts that the letter was written by the Guide, but, as hard as she tries, she cannot understand  _ why. _

So, another few days later, when she can hold a quill without too much pain, she pens a reply.

_ Thank you for your letter. I’m recovering well enough, although I have become restless from having to spend so long in bed. I haven’t been sleeping well again.  _

She tries to write another sentence, but a shock of white-hot pain shoots through her arm and blurs her vision. She’s left a blot of ink on the page, but rewriting it is too daunting a prospect when her arm feels like it’s ablaze.

She signs the letter with a clumsy _X_ and sends it.

For a few days, her thoughts are occupied by the Guide’s letter. She studies the sheet of paper as though there is a second message concealed underneath the text. An explanation as to why he decided to write to her for the first time in almost a year, maybe. Or whether she can expect more letters from him. She can hardly imagine the Guide breaking his silence just to be courteous, but there is nothing in his letter that suggests any other motives.

She still doesn’t sleep well, but the nightmares of the lake stay at bay.

Then, five days later, he shows up at her door. 

She’s sat on the chair that, along with the table beside it, makes up most of the furniture in her room. Her arm is propped up on the table and she’s in the process of rubbing and slowly flexing her fingers to work off the stiffness. 

A knock on the door pulls her out of her focus. She assumes one of the other guards is coming to check on her, so she says without thinking, “Come in.”

The Guide steps into her room.

For a moment, Kikka’s mind is unable to reconcile his presence with her home, that same unreadable, stern expression he wore on the bridges with the cheerful crackling of the fireplace and the smell of freshly brewed tea.

He looks more tired than the last time she saw him. Dark circles rim his eyes and his cheeks seem gaunter, as if he’s lost weight. Still, he carries himself with his shoulders squared and his head held high, and Kikka wouldn’t think him in any way uneasy if she didn’t notice his fist balled at his side.

He barely spares a glance across the room before his eyes fall on Kikka, then dart to her arm. Compulsively, she turns to look at it too, and she almost pushes her sleeve down to hide the red, angry line of her fresh scar.

“You’re recovering well,” the Guide says. His voice is as she remembered it: quiet but firm, and so perfectly composed.

Kikka wishes she had his self-command. “I—yes, I feel much better now.”

“It was a clean cut?” he inquires, eyes still fixed on her healing wound. 

“It was, yes. From a sword.”

His expression doesn’t change. “That kind of injury usually heals without many complications.”

“Yes.” Surely there’s more she can say than that? She can feel her cheeks burning. She blurts out the first thing she can come up with: “What are you doing here?”

He meets her eyes at last. Despite his impassive expression, there’s a flicker of… something in his eyes. Uncertainty. 

“I gathered from your last letter that you’re in no state to write, so I decided to to save you the trouble.”

The way he says it is perfectly matter of fact, yet his eyes widen in an unspoken question.

Kikka finds herself nodding in encouragement. “That’s… very thoughtful of you. Would you care to sit?” She gestures at the other free chair in the room, across the table.

The Guide only hesitates for a moment before he steps toward it and sits down. Kikka looks at him and their eyes meet, and then she needs to avert her gaze. Heat is slowly climbing up her face and she finds herself at a loss for what to say. She stares at the table when her empty tea mug gives her an idea. “Do you want some tea? I still have some hot water—”

“Don’t concern yourself with that. Your arm needs to rest.”

She nods, because she doesn’t have it in her to argue. He has a point, anyway: her forearm is beginning to throb again, the pain licking up to her shoulder like she stuck her arm in a fire. She rubs it absently, trying to ease some of the sensation.

“Here,” the Guide opens his hands and rests them on the table. “Give me your arm.”

Kikka blinks. “What?”

He wiggles his fingers by way of response and she sighs, resigned. 

She shuffles and gingerly lays her arms in his hands, ignoring the way her heart is pounding. His fingers close around her forearm, firm and cool. She holds her breath, as if the softest sound would disturb this moment. 

He starts gently rubbing along her arm. His thumbs circle around her wound, never coming close enough to it to cause discomfort, and move outwards and down to her hand with slow circles of his thumbs. He lingers in the spots where her muscles have locked together, kneading until she feels herself relaxing. 

When the residual pain from her injury has subdued and her arm feels warm and tingly, he moves to her fingers. He rubs down each of them, folds and stretches them, instructing Kikka to stop him if it becomes uncomfortable. It doesn’t, and with his help, she works up to being able to make a tight fist for the first time since she got hurt.

Eventually, he lets go of her arm and rests it back on the table. Kikka stares at it. She can’t bring herself to look up. “...Thank you.”

He doesn’t respond. That’s enough cause for her to peer at his face.

His eyes meet hers. The blue of his irises is as deep and cold as Sinnlos’s waters, and it would be so easy to drown in them. He averts his gaze.

“I should leave.”

Yet, he doesn’t move right away. Kikka expects him to be on his way as soon as he has made up his mind about it, but there’s a moment of hesitation, and their gaze flicks to hers again. She wants to plead with him to stay a while longer, but she knows better than to imagine that would be enough. 

“You’ve been reading my letters,” she says instead. 

He stays seated, and the ghost of a smile curves his lips. “Not in the beginning. The first four, five that you sent me, I didn’t open. I didn’t throw them away, either, which I suppose shows that I was weaker than I would have liked from the very start.”

“I learned to look forward to them,” he continues. “To the next sealed envelope that I would refuse to open. I wondered how long it would take you to give up.” He pauses, then lets out a laugh, brief and humourless. “I didn’t consider that I might be the first to, not until I was halfway through reading your latest one.”

“It had been a bad couple of nights, the worst journey since your own, and something compelled me to open the envelope I received at sunrise. Then all the others before that. And so I found myself writing back.” He falls silent, as if the rest of his story is self-evident. 

Kikka supposes that it is. She leans back in her chair, thinking his words over, pretending that they didn’t send her heart into a gallop inside her chest. She wonders if her letters brought half as much comfort to the Guide as writing them did to her.

“I’m glad you came,” she murmurs, at last.

He nods. “It was an ill-advised trip, and one that I doubt I will be making again.”

It’s not a surprising statement, but one that stings regardless. Kikka brings herself to nod. “I wouldn’t impose on you like that.”

The Guide heaves a sigh and sinks back against the wooden backrest of his chair. “You don’t understand. I don’t— _ can’t  _ leave Sinnlos for too long.”

Yet here he is, sitting across the table from her, the expression in his eyes as intense as it is lost. Kikka knows that he’s not going to tell her anything more than this, so she doesn’t press it. She takes comfort in the knowledge that he’s not quite as resolute as he would like to appear. He would not be here if he was, would he?

“Do you want me to keep writing to you?”

His eyes snap to her arm. “You still need to recover. You should not be writing for a while yet.”

“And after my arm heals?”

“I could not stop you if I wanted to.” Kikka isn’t sure, but she thinks she catches his lips quirking up. She feels herself smile in return, and they linger in this shared moment.

Then, his chair scratches across the floor as he pulls himself upright. “It’s time for me to leave.”

She watches him cross the room with purposeful strides. He pauses with his hand on the doorknob and turns back to look at her. “When you have healed… talk to me about your night terrors.”

He leaves before she can think of a reply, pulling the door closed behind himself.

Kikka is left alone in the quiet room. The fire has gone out and she feels the evening chill creeping into the air.

Cautiously, she curls her fingers into a fist again. The pain has subsided and the movement is still easier, smoother. She smiles to herself.

“Goodbye, Guide. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> title is from the song such unrest by brown bird
> 
> thank you for reading! find me on twitter [@decadencethief](https://twitter.com/decadencethief)


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